Sauce Labs: Automate Testing with Confidence

Today’s developers need to automate more testing to ensure they can deliver software on time. To do it right, they need access to a testing environment that mirrors the operating systems, browsers and mobile devices customers actually use in the real world.

Sauce Labs helps accelerate development processes by providing actual devices and virtual machines developers can test against in an automated way using Selenium, Appium and Espresso.

“Functional testing can take a lot of time, especially if you’re trying to test against all those different platforms that are relevant to your particular installed base,” said Lubos Parobek, vice president of product at Sauce Labs. “For example, if you’re an ecommerce retailer, you want to make sure that your latest website or mobile app works across the different desktop browsers, mobile browsers, devices etc. Doing that testing can be quite time-consuming and so one of the big problems that we’re focused on here at Sauce is how to accelerate that by doing testing in the cloud.”

Increasingly, developers are turning to Sauce Labs for testing since setting up a realistic test environment is too expensive and burdensome for enterprises or ISVs to build and maintain.

“What they realize is that while the initial setup of one or two browsers might not be super difficult, trying to cover all the platforms, browsers and devices, and keeping them all up to date can be really time-consuming and expensive,” said Parobek. “Not only do you have to run all the usual server infrastructure to have a Windows or Linux Selenium grid, but you need Mac hardware for macOS and iOS support, and then you need real mobile devices which just add additional layers of complexity.”

More than a billion tests have been run at Sauce Labs to date – with over one million every day.

Test AffordablyWith Sauce Labs, developers no longer have to worry about how to test against all the different operating systems, devices and browser combinations because Sauce Lab’s comprehensive cloud covers all of that. What’s more, developers can choose from testing options that meet their requirements and budgets.

“We offer people lots of options and flexibility. Whether you have a native mobile application, hybrid application or web application, or whether you need to test against a specific real device, we have you covered,” said Parobek. “Sauce Labs provides the most comprehensive testing cloud for web and mobile testing.”

Sauce Labs has more than 800 combinations of different operating systems, browsers, and real devices available for testing. Zillow chose Sauce Labs because it was the only Selenium cloud-based solution that allowed its developers to automate testing on any operating system and browser combination.

“One of the important parts about our service is making sure we give organizations options in terms of the budget required for effective testing,” said Parobek. “Even if use a cloud service, you don’t want to spend an exorbitant amount of money. We let organizations choose between emulators and simulators and real devices, based on their testing volume and frequency, requirements and budget. We have hundreds of real device, simulator and emulator combinations.”

That way, developers can weigh testing features and cost, and choose an appropriate option.

Sauce Labs has become popular among developers because they can test affordably and save time. In fact, some developers have been able to reduce the time required for testing from weeks to days and from days to hours. For example, Campus Explorer, a college search and planning site, cut its testing time from 72 hours to 72 minutes. The time savings enable developers to focus on building features for their website or app, rather than focusing on testing.

New VSTS Plugin Available

Sauce Labs just announced the Sauce plugin for Microsoft Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) that automates the build process.

“People are trying to automate as much of their delivery pipeline as they can,” said Parobek. “When a developer finishes a feature, they’ll do a pull request that automatically runs unit and functional tests on that code before it’s merged into master. They want to make sure they are not introducing a breaking change.“

One way to avoid testing errors and speed testing is to remove the need for human intervention. With the plugin, developers can configure tests via VSTS so whenever there’s a pull request or a check in, the developer can use Sauce Labs to run a set of integration or functional tests.

“The plugin enables you to pass credentials to Sauce Labs so you can automatically start your tests using a secure tunnel,” said Parobek. If you’re testing behind your firewall, you have a secure tunnel automatically.”

The test results come back via VSTS so developers can see what tests succeeded and failed, without leaving VSTS.